the u.s. patent office issued patent number 46,454. i will give you a pop quiz. it was simply labeled john deere plow. but the implement sketched out on the page could just as easily been labeled, as some historians have named it, one of the most important inventions in american history. they called it the plow that broke the plains, and it did. by replacing cast-iron with smooth steel, john deere's innovation opened up huge new swaths of land for cultivation. it made it possible for towns like aberdeen south dakota my hometown to exist. before it killing and maker took a grown man a full 24 hours. after it, it took as little as five. and every pile of soil overturned upended another assumption about what the land could produce. that, to my mind, has been the story, not just of agricultural success, but of national success. and, indeed, of global progress. this kind of game changing innovation has enabled us to leap ahead, to break the points, to increase harvest, and to frankly, feed the whol